banks of the
ditches. Along the road travelled the endless procession of camels,
asses, oxen, black goats, and foot-passengers, which enlivened to such
an extent that peaceful, flat landscape. I had already noticed when in
Holland the additional importance given to figures by a flat country;
the lack of hills makes them stand out, and as they usually show against
the sky they loom larger. I seemed to see pass by the zones of painted
_bassi-relievi_ representing agricultural scenes which occasionally
formed part of the decoration of the halls of Egyptian tombs. Here and
there rose villages or farms, the lines of whose sloping, earth-gray
walls recalled the substructures of antique temples. Groups of sycamore
and mimosa trees, set off by clumps of date palms, brought out the soft
tones of the walls by the contrast of their rich verdure. Elsewhere I
caught sight of fellahin huts surmounted by whitewashed dovecotes,
placed side by side like beehives or the minarets of a mosque. We soon
reached Tantah, a somewhat important town, to which the fine mosque of
Seyd Ahmed Badouy attracts pilgrims twice a year, and the fairs of which
are frequented by the caravans.

Tantah, from the railway station,--for the train does not stop long
enough to allow travellers to visit the town,--has an animated and
picturesque aspect. Amid the houses in the Arab style with their
look-outs and their awnings, rise buildings in that Oriental-Italian
style dear to persons of progress and of modern ideas, painted in soft
colours, ochre, salmon, or sky-blue; flat-roofed clay huts; over all,
the minarets of the mosque, the white cupolas of a few tombs, and the
inevitable fig trees and palms rising above the low garden walls.
Between the town and the station stretches waste ground, a sort of
fair-ground, on which are camps, huts of reed or of date-palm branches,
tents formed of old rags of cloth and sometimes of the linen of an
unrolled turban. The inhabitants of these frail dwellings cook in the
open air. The coffee is made, a cup at a time, in a small brass kettle,
and on plates of tin are cooked the thin doora cakes. The fuel is
camel's-dung. The fellahs suck eagerly the sweetish juice of the
sugar-cane cut into short pieces, and the slices of watermelon show
within the green skin their ripe, rosy, flesh, spotted with black seeds.
Women, as graceful as statues, come and go, holding the end of their
veil between their teeth so as to conceal one half of